Frequently Asked Questions

Q:

What's new in OmniWeb 2.0?

A:

New Features for OmniWeb 2.0

Architecture:

• The web library has been completely rewritten, object-oriented from the ground up. It uses NeXT's Foundation library, paving the way to OpenStep.
• True multithreading, using OpenStep threads, allows concurrent operations. You can now download two files at once, or continue browsing as you download in the background.
• Bundle architecture allows you to add new types of addresses, converters, viewers, and preferences.
• The HTML parser can be categorized and extended.

User interface:

• Open company opens a company's web page quickly (Command-shift-C)
• Flush cache empties entire cache.
• Processes panel displays what's being downloaded.
• Inspector lets you modify bookmarks and search targets.

Editing HTML:

• View, edit, review, and save HTML from any document anywhere.
• Also can edit RTF and plain text files.
• Drag and drop URLs or normal files into the edit window to automatically insert an anchor reference to that URL or file.
• OmniWeb can be configured to recognize files that have come from the local HTTP server, and suggests an intelligent filename if they are edited and saved.

Images:

• No external image filter is needed for JPEG, progressive JPEG, GIF, TIFF, PNG, XPM, XBM, or TIFF images.
• Progressive refinement JPEG images are now supported. These not only quickly load in blurry and then get more sharp over time, but they also usually require less total space (and thus less total time to download) than the same quality non-progressive JPEGs. NetScape 2.0, Spyglass Mosaic, and assumedly Microsoft's Internet Explorer all support progressive JPEG as well. Here's another example.
• Images are presented incrementally as they are loaded.
• Image size hints in HTML are obeyed.
• GIFs and JPEGs are gamma-corrected by a user-settable value. Without gamma-correction images that look OK under Windows will look washed-out under NEXTSTEP.
• All images begin loading simultaneously with the text, rather than one at a time. This reduces page loading time considerably from OmniWeb 1.0.
• Clicking on an image displays it in OmniWeb, rather than spawning an external viewer.
• Spyglass style client-side image maps are now supported, which are much faster (don't require a round-trip to the server). Rectangular, circular, and polygonal regions are supported (NetScape only does rectangles, but Microsoft Internet Explorer and Spyglass Mosaic do all three).
• Netscape 1.2 style image align=left and align=right attributes display properly.
• Text now doesn't display beyond images which don't know their size, so there is no more "jerking around" of the text as the page is loaded. (This will be a preference in the final version, for people on slow links.)

Preferences:

• New font preferences for specifying Normal, Header, and Fixed pitch font.
• New cache preferences allow you to specify which file types get cached for how long.
• Loadable bundles allow you to add your own preferences for your own modules.
• System administrators can set up site-wide values for any preference (using NetInfo), and also specify if individual users can override the site default. (Great if your site has style standards; or a firewall which requires all users to use the same proxy server.)
• New image preferences allows user to set how often images should try to display their incremental progress as they load in.
• Spoof preferences allows user to specify a list of domains that stubbornly will only give HTML 3.0 documents (with tables and frames) to Netscape. OmniWeb will then spoof these servers into thinking OmniWeb is Netscape.

Browsing:

• The jumpTo URL textfield accepts relative URLs.
• Pressing 'g' selects the jumpTo URL textfield.
• Alt-dragging drags new window for current link (from URL wells, too.)
• Control-clicking or right-clicking selects a link without following it
• Command-clicking on a link downloads the link in the background, so you can go on browsing.
• A horizontal scroll bar is added to the HTML browser when an image or table is too wide to fit in the current window.
• RTF files from any source are displayed inside OmniWeb. In fact, you can view, edit, review, and save the RTF source using our new edit source feature.

HTTP:

• Netscape 1.1 style server-push is supported. This allows primitive animations and other effects.
• Netscape 2.0 style cookies are supported. These allow servers to more easily keep track of who a user is in-between pages, useful for things like internet shopping.
• URLs now know if they are "generated" (eg, from a cgi script), and will draw as hollow 'zaps'. This means the page will refetch correctly and not hit the cache if you enter or click on the same address again, but will hit the cache if you back up in history.
• SSL available separately (for free, with source code) as a separate module.
• Dynamic Document Support
  • Added support for Dynamic Documents, both "server push" (via multipart/x-mixed-replace content) and "client pull" (via the Refresh header).

HTML Extensions:

• Netscape 1.2 background images
• Netscape 1.2 font size extensions
• Netscape 1.2 style background color, text color, and link colors.
• Spyglass Mosaic, Internet Explorer, and Netscape 2.0 font color changes.
• Internet Explorer named colors (black, olive, teal, red, blue, maroon, navy, gray, lime, fuchsia, green, purple, silver, yellow, aqua). We also support the 140 Netscape 2.0 colors.
• Netscape 1.2 styleparagraph centering.
• HTML 3.0 and Netscape 2.0 <DIV> supported.
• HTML 3.0 style

  paragraph centering and

  right justification

• Both HTML 3.0 and Netscape style tables
• Netscape 2.0 style frames
• HTML 3.0 and Netscape 2.0 tags: <BIG>, <SMALL>, _<SUB>, ^<SUP>.
• List improvements:
  • <OL> now understands Netscape 1.0's START parameter.
  • <OL> now understands HTML 3.0's CONTINUE and SEQNUM parameters.
  • <UL> now understands Netscape 1.0's TYPE parameter, which can be disc, circle, or square. (Or moose or squirrel).
  • <UL> now supports the HTML 3.0 PLAIN attribute, which prints no bullets.
• <HR> now supports the HTML 3.0 SRC= attribute, which allows you to specify an image to use for the horizontal rule.

Forms:

• RFC 1867 style file input forms (implemented by Netscape 2.0 as well).
• TEXT inputs on forms now support DISABLED and ALIGN={LEFT|RIGHT|CENTER} attibutes, by customer request.

FTP:

• Connections stay open between downloads for faster response.
• The FTP user interface has been completely revamped to look more like NeXT's Workspace.
• File sizes are calculated and displayed.
• OmniWeb will communicate with servers that don't support passive connections.
• Drag and drop is supported for dragging URLs from FTP views, and command-drag and drop is supported for dragging files from FTP views into the browser or other apps.

Bookmarks:

• Bookmarks that have unviewed changes or are unreachable are flagged with a special icon for your attention.
• Bookmarks now have their own inspector.
• Without opening a bookmarked page, you can quickly check it for changes since your last viewing, or set the inspector to automatically check at a specified time interval.
• Bookmarks can be opened in browser windows, as bookmark lists, or as librarian bookshelves.

Librarian:

• Our new searching panel allows quick and easy searching of indexes and forms, including local indexes and internet servers like WebCrawler.

PDF:

• With OmniPDF installed, OmniWeb will display Adobe Acrobat documents.

Major bugs fixed:

• OmniWeb spots unterminated comments and terminates them automatically.
• On complicated pages, OmniWeb 1.0 occasionally reported an "internal application error" (caused by too many levels of RTF nesting in the Text object). This has been fixed for 2.0.
• OmniWeb used to print an extra line after the bullet if authors put a header inside of a list, which is technically illegal but was commonly done to get larger fonts. This is fixed.
• <BR> (forced line break) is never ignored. The standard wasn't clear when OmniWeb 1.0 was written whether there were situations in which line breaks should be collapsed, now we never collapse them.

Valid for 2.0

Product literature and demonstration software are available. For more information about this or any other Lighthouse Design product, send e-mail to info@lighthouse.com.